German cops raid Wikileaks after Internet blacklist posted

German police have raided the homes of a man associated with the whistleblower …

German police on Tuesday raided the homes of Theodor Reppe, owner of the German domain for the controversial whistleblower site Wikileaks. According to Wikileaks itself, police told Reppe he was targeted because of his links to the site, and official documents indicate the search was meant to uncover evidence of "distribution of pornographic material." Though Wikileaks itself doesn't host porn, site administrators believe the impetus for the raids may be their recent publication of a secret Australian blacklist of banned sites, which includes the URLs of numerous sites that host child pornography.

Police in both Dresden and Jena appear to have coordinated in simultaneous searches of Reppe's residence, and asked him to turn over passwords associated with the Wikileaks.de domain, which they reportedly hoped to disable. But Wikileaks says that Reppe, who also hosts a popular server for the anonymous Tor routing network, is not actively involved with its operations beyond holding the registration for the .de domain and mirroring an archive of Congressional Research Service reports released by the site earlier this year.

A more recent leak may have brought the site into police crosshairs: last week the site posted what it claimed were lists of banned websites maintained by the Australian Media and Communications Authority. As part of a much-criticized content filtering scheme, currently in the testing stage, the secret list is distributed to ISPs and the makers of filtering software.

Stephen Conroy, Australia's Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, initially denied that the posted lists were accurate, noting that the official ACMA blacklist contained only 1,061 sites at the date on the leaked document, which included some 2,300 URLs. Colin Jacobs of the civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia suggested that the discrepancy was likely the result of an individual vendor combining their own blacklist with the government's, and Conroy later acknowledged that an updated post was "close" to the official list. Many of the sites on the list appear to host child pornography (we declined to click through to check), but press reports have noted the inclusion of sites offering adult pornography, online gambling, and even a few MySpace pages and ordinary businesses.

Wikileaks called the raids a symptom of "social hysteria around child pornography" in Germany, and claimed that police breached protocol by failing to inform Reppe of his rights and falsely asserting, on the official search document, that Reppe had consented to have the search proceed without a witness present. Neither Wikileaks.de nor any of the site's other domains have been affected, though Wikileaks.org was down as a result of heavy traffic much of Wednesday, and as of this writing, its front page appears to have reverted to an earlier version.

This is scarcely the first time that the site has come under fire: attempts to shut it down have come from diverse quarters, from Swiss bankers to the Mormon and Scientologist churches. They've even been threatened with prosecution by the head of Germany's foreign spy service.

Wikileaks is based in Sweden, where stringent journalistic shield laws bar any effort to uncover the identity of a reporter's anonymous source—which may come in handy given that Australian authorities have suggested they may pursue legal action against the leaker if they can identify the responsible party. A spokesperson for Wikileaks told Australian press that while one of the blacklists posted on the site was definitely the impetus for the Geman raids, it's unclear whether it had been spurred by any direct contact with anyone in the Australian government.

21 Reader Comments

German police are tools. What did they expect to find? A domain registration receipt? They obviously don't know even simple basics like that if you have a domain it doesn't mean they stuff is on your home PC.Oh, and weren't there servers in Germany on that leaked Danish list? How comes nobody raided them?This raid just means that the government feels threatened by its people, and that is a good thing. Hooray for my home country.

This crap has gone beyond questionable and is now firmly in the "absurd" column.

quote:

Many of the sites on the list appear to host child pornography (we declined to click through to check), but press reports have noted the inclusion of sites offering adult pornography, online gambling, and even a few MySpace pages and ordinary businesses.

Yes, someone NEEDS to check, because i think they are full of shit. If you, Australian government morons, are so good at compiling lists of active child porn sites on the OPEN INTERNET, you should be able to get them shut down. Don't tell me it can't be done, or its 'too hard', it can be done and it should be done.

This child porn blacklist bullshit is just a cover for the real purpose, the ability to censor things people actually WANT TO SEE, that are NOT illegal. As noted in the story and the quote i gave above, there are things that have NOTHING TO DO with child porn on these lists, it happens every time. Give people too much power and they will abuse it. These people who want to censor the internet or force ISPs to assist them in doing so have TOO MUCH POWER, and they ARE abusing it.

It is not the case that censoring or blacklists are the only answer, I reject that argument entirely. The U.S and other countries have been very successful in the past in getting sites that participate in distributing child porn shut down, in getting servers confiscated, and in getting people arrested and prosecuted. Nothing has changed, except perhaps that certain groups what to use the child porn boogeyman to get a rise out of people and get them to agree to absurdly invasive and illegitimate solutions to a problem that i don't believe even exists in the proportion that is being claimed.

And this Wikileaks raid crap, what the hell are you going to accomplish? If these sites are so notorious and untouchable, the people who want to know where they are will find them anyway. That isn't the case, and we all know it. Given the content of this blacklist, i think the people who want to enforce its use in Australia don't want people to know they are trying to censor things that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the list.

German police are tools. What did they expect to find? A domain registration receipt? They obviously don't know even simple basics like that if you have a domain it doesn't mean they stuff is on your home PC.

Your asking the wrong questions. The right question is "What did they hope to accomplish?"

Governments work through a series of threats and intimidation. Quite often they do everything they can to strip the ability of people to resist the government and at the same time do everything to prop up their own power.

I am not exagerating or trying to make government look evil. This is simply how they operate. Its fact.

Try not paying your taxes some time and see what sort of graduated responses you get... starting with fines, then people visiting your home and threatening you, and eventually legal proceedings which they begin taking your private property away. If you resist further, say you try to prevent them from taking your stuff, then they will send armed men to forcibly restrain you and then lock you in a cage.

All of that is simply a fact. All country governments do it and is simply how they operate. Fact is that you can probably not pay your taxes and get away with it for years, possibly decades in any country. But people are too scared to try to do that so they submit, if they are not otherwise motivated by some sense of civil duty.

So in this specific case a group of armed men were sent as representatives of the German government to ransack a man's possessions and violate every aspect of his privacy. They did this as a result of him being associated with a website that had the fortitude to post secrets that another government, half way around the world, wanted to keep from it's own citizens.

Think about that for a whole two seconds.

I do not think for one second that the person that sent those thugs to the domain owner's house was stupid about computers.

Here is what I am thinking:

I am sure that several people that read this article afterwards went to the wikileaks site and got a copy of that list downloaded to their computers. Maybe not intentionally, but by simply viewing the list requires downloading a copy to their computer in one way or another.

And then a smaller percentage of those people actually then visited some of the websites listed there. Not because they are perverts, but because they are curious and probably are skeptical and wanted to see for themselves the sort of data that is really in those websites.

By doing that they are probably going to get images sent to their computer that are very bad. These images then get saved to a computer's browser cache.

------------------------

See?

The goal here is to send a strong message to the citizens of Germany that they better not fuck around with government secrets.

I expect that there are plenty of people in that government that would like to see nothing more then to implement their own set of country-wide filters. And, of course, like Australian's government they are smart enough to realize that it will be extremely difficult to censor it completely and thus publishing the lists of banned sites will have the opposite effect of trying to ban them in the first place.

So... If Germany is willing to throw armed people to violate a person's liberty for the sake of a Government half way around the world... then what sort of response would people get if the German government itself tried to implement filters and those people tried to stand up to them?

This sort of thing is very intimidating.

Of course if they found a kiddie porn thumbnail in his browser's cache they would have something better to publish in the papers and it would of been much easier for them to throw him into jail for a few months, and if they are lucky a few years. (and hence making the message even stronger) But breaking a bunch of his stuff and taking his computer was probably good enough for now.

Wikileaks is based in Sweden, where stringent journalistic shield laws bar any effort to uncover the identity of a reporter's anonymous source

This is not entirely true, AFAIK. A web page that wishes to enjoy these rights needs to register a legally responsible person with The Swedish Radio and TV Authority. I get no hits searching for Wikileaks here ("namn" = name, "domänadress" = domain address), so presumably these laws do not apply.

If Wikileaks were to register such a person it would indeed be illegal to even try to uncover the identity of the source. Chances are Wikileaks won't register anyone though, if they did the person would probably almost immediately be held legally responsible (unless, of course, everything posted is legal in Sweden). Right now only the operator of the site can be held responsible, and proving who that is might be a little more difficult.

For instance in 2002 the person responsible for everything published on the online version of Sweden's largest newspaper Aftonbladet was found guilty after a user had posted some Nazi comments.

I'm still not sure, this raid was actually about wikileaks ... This guy is also involved in the Tor network. And there have been some child pornographic raids of Tor servers in the past. Since there hasn't been any public statements from law enforcement so far, so anybody should be careful to jump to conclusions.

Originally posted by match:I'm still not sure, this raid was actually about wikileaks ... This guy is also involved in the Tor network. And there have been some child pornographic raids of Tor servers in the past. Since there hasn't been any public statements from law enforcement so far, so anybody should be careful to jump to conclusions.

This is true, however raiding the persons house for operating a tor exit node is equally ridiculous, a simple visit and a request to look at the equipment involved would have cleared any unanswered questions.

Um..was child porn legal in Germany at one point? Or was that Holland?

It was actually legal in most of Europe for decades. They even had published magazines with personal ads in them. Didn't start becoming a big problem that the police had to get involved with until the 70s.

I am so grateful for Wikileaks. They deserve support for what they do.

Publishing the secret Australian blacklist compiled by nameless bureaucrats without oversight or appeal, has been vital in showing the absolute deceit and bald faced lies the Dishonourable Conjob and his effeminate puppet master KRudd, PM., have been engaged in since they came to office.

They both should be arrested for treason, and for committing acts of terrorism by the state against the people of Australia.

The Germans should reflect on past mistakes in their history and purge those who wish to return that country to Nazism again.

If the big media also didn't want to kill the freedom of the Internet, there might be more exposure of the constant lies and concealment. If the right exposure was given, most of these criminals would be voted out come the next election.

As long as the mainstream point of view is that we need to do everything we can to stop child porn on the internet, this kind of thing will happen. We need to give up on the futile fight against the distribution of child porn and instead concentrate on finding and arresting those who produce it.

The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst ~ foreign new service) ie German CIA are still very upset over its secret agents getting exposed in a black flag operation in Kosovo on wikileaks.T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom) was exposed revealing over two dozen secret IP address ranges used by the BND.The email of a top BND official might have also been listed on wikileaks.

I think this is more of a chilling effect within German.Expose the state, the state will visit you.

Wikileaks did not only make a list of websites available, but they made each and every URI a clickable link.--By the way, does anyone here know how Wikileaks' links affect page ranks of the linked websites?--Mr. Reppe's lawyer pointed out that by what he knew the whole case is about linking to pages that link to forbidden content. The fact that this was an Australian government list or even that it was an official list at all seems not to have been important. Speaking of importance, other thnigs obviously are important to know: The same kind of thing happened prior to the G8 summit in 2007. This time the electoral campaigns have just begun and the governing parties want to show action again. So the message is once again: "Don't mess around with us. We know what you do or want to do and we can catch you anytime we want."By the way, even if the action was illegal German law does not prevent everything found during the raid to be held as means of evidence.